Great Throughts Treasury

"No man, however great, is known to everybody and no man, however solitary, is known to nobody."

"No place in England where everyone can go is considered respectable."

"One thing that cannot be denied to the realists: a constant and intense desire to write well, to write artistically. When I think of what they have done in the matter of the use of words, of the myriad verbal effects they have discovered, of the thousand forms of composition they have created, how they have remodeled and refashioned the language in their untiring striving for intensity of expression for the very osmazome of art, I am lost in ultimate wonder and admiration."

"One must be in London to see the spring."

"Probably everything you've heard is true, ... but we've got to put that into context."

"Remorse: beholding heaven and feeling hell."

"Self is man’s main business; all outside of self is uncertain, all comes from self, all returns to self."

"Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism."

"Terrible is the day when each sees his soul naked, stripped of all veil; that dear soul which he cannot change or discard, and which is so irreparably his."

"The difference between my quotations and those of the next man is that I leave out the inverted commas."

"The poor would never be able to live at all if it were not for the poor."

"The public will accept a masterpiece, but it will not accept an attempt to write a masterpiece."

"The idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the art of the old world that was based on imagination, an art that should explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civilization, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vastness of the conception, and the towering height of the ambition."

"The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it... you and you alone make me feel that I am alive... Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough."

"The lot of critics is to be remembered by what they failed to understand."

"The wrong way always seems the more reasonable"

"The world is dying of machinery; that is the great disease, that is the plague that will sweep away and destroy civilization; man will have to rise against it sooner or later."

"The young girl is often pretty but her prettiness is vague and uncertain, it inspires a sort of pitying admiration, but it suggests nothing; the very essence of the young girl's being is that she should have nothing to suggest, therefore the beauty of the young face fails to touch the imagination. No past lies hidden in those translucent eyes, no story of hate, disappointment, or sin."

"There is always a right and a wrong way, and the wrong way always seems the more reasonable."

"We all want notoriety; our desires on this point, as upon others, are not noble, but the human is very despicable vermin and only tolerable when it tends to the brute, and away from the evangelical."

"There is nothing so consoling as to find that one's neighbor's troubles are at least as great as one's own."

"We do want to see international and American investment in Zaire, but right now, investment is going to be affected by the fact that there is a civil war."

"Ugliness is trivial, the monstrous is terrible."

"We humans are more complicated than animals, and we love through the imagination."

"To be aristocratic in Art one must avoid polite society."

"Within the oftentimes bombastic and truculent appearance that I present to the world, trembles a heart shy as a wren in the hedgerow or a mouse along the wainscoting."

"When any man is more stupidly vain and outrageously egotistic than his fellows, he will hide his hideousness in humanitarianism."

"We live in our desires rather than in our achievements."